Bob Reselman stopped by today (just in time). Bob left a little bomb in my life last year on a .Net Rocks show. They gave away the weekly prize to the first 5 people who answered this question - What is something that you've created that you are proud of... BTW, Bob hates the question... pride is one of the 7 deadly sins (and probably the most fatal of them). Nevertheless, I have spent much of my career as a coding slave to someone else (that's the point). Bob's question exposed me for what I am -- someone else's coder and not my own. Bob let people cop out (I know he would disagree that he copped out) and say “my kids”, “my music”, etc. All of which are good answers, but they don't really drill into the heart of my issue... I program because I have to and I program not for myself... I don't even program for the betterment of society... Ultimately I program stuff for other people who can't program so that those people can push a button and make money...
It's all true... I admit it... well, it was until this weekend... You see I had Friday off and the weekend was pretty much waiting for a happening (which happened today)... so in preparation I had some time (about 4 hours total) to build something that I want. Let me start by saying I love EBooks... I love that their production doesn't kill a tree and that I can carry them around in a small device (a Pocket PC to be specific) that has a light so I can even read in the dark. Something else I just discovered (which may seem geeky to you) is the CBR/CBZ file. These are used primarily to archive comic books... you scan all the pages of the comic book and then either Zip them or Rar them (now you know why I want a programming interface to Rar in the compact framework) up into a sing archive with the file extension being either CBZ or CBR. So I built a CBZ viewer that has a scrolling viewport (scans tend to be way to big for the pocket pc and trimming the dimensions down tends to make the text unreadable). I also built a regular .Net Framework app for viewing the files as well as for auto-trimming the files down to better fit on a Pocket PC.
For zipping I used... ComponentOne's free zip component (it comes with MS' Mobile Resource kit)... I tried to use SharpZip, but when I loaded the images via a stream I was not getting the complete image. I'm very happy with the component.
I'll probably release the source as soon as I figure out all the legal implications (and if I do release the source it won't be GPL )
BTW, I'm also proud of my sons as well (the second one was born today at 1:25pm... he weighed 10lbs 5ox, and was 23 inches long... a very big baby... Maybe bigger than Tim's son... but probably not).